BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

“The son of a bitch’s been staying there, all right,” Marino exclaimed. “But he ain’t there now. Trash, food wrappers, crap all over the place. And hairs in the damn bed. The sheets stink like a dirty, wet dog.”

Electricity crackled up my veins.

“HIDTA’s got a squad out somewhere, and I’ve got cops all over the place. He takes one dip in the river and we got his ass.”

“Lucy’s bringing Jo home, Marino,” I said. “She’s out there, too.”

“You’re by yourself?” he blurted out.

“Inside, locked up, alarm on, pistol on the table.”

“Well, you stay right where you are, you hear me!”

“Don’t worry.”

“One good thing is, it’s snowing really hard. About three inches already, and you know how snow lights up everything. Ain’t a good time for him to be out wandering around.”

I hung up and skipped from channel to channel, but nothing interested me. I got up and wandered into my office to check my e-mail.but didn’t feel like answering any of it. I picked up the jar of formalin and held it up to the light, looking at those small yellow eyes that were really gold dots reduced in size, and I thought about how off-base I’d been about so much. I anguished over every slow step and every wrong turn I’d taken. Now two more women were dead.

I set the jar of formalin on the coffee table in the great room. At eleven I turned to NBC to watch the news. Of course, it was all about this evil man, this Loup-Garou. As I changed to another channel, I was shocked by my burglar alarm. The remote control fell to the floor as I jumped up and fled to the back of the house. My heart was coming out of my chest. I locked my bedroom door and grabbed my Glock, waiting for the phone to ring. Minutes later it did.

“Zone six, the garage door,” I was told. “Do you want the police?”

“Yes! I want them now!” I said.

I sat on my bed and let the alarm beat my eardrums as it hammered and hammered. I kept an eye on the Aiphone monitor, and then remembered it would not work if the police didn’t ring the bell. And, as I knew so well, they never did. I had no choice but to turn the alarm off and reset it and sit and wait in silence, straining so hard to hear every sound that I imagined I could hear the snow falling.

Barely ten minutes later, there was a sharp rapping on my front door and I hurried down the hallway as a voice on the porch loudly called’out “Police.”

With great relief I placed my pistol on the dining-room table and said, “Who is it?”

I wanted to be sure.

“Police, ma’am. We’re responding to your alarm.”

I opened the door and the same two officers from several nights before knocked snow off their boots and came in.

“You’ve not been having a good time of it lately, have you?” Officer Butler said as she pulled off her gloves, her eyes moving around. “You might say we’ve taken a personal interest in you.”

“Garage door this time,” McElwayne, her partner, said. “Okay, let’s take a look.”

I followed them through the mud room and into _ the garage, and instantly knew this was no false alarm. The garage door had been pried up about six inches, and when we got down to look through the opening, we saw footprints in the snow leading to the door and then away from it. There were no apparent tool marks except for scrapes on the rubber strip at the bottom of the door. The footprints were lightly dusted with snow. They- had been left recently, and that was consistent with when the alarm had gone off,

McElwayne got on the radio and requested a B&E detective, who showed up twenty minutes later and took photographs of the door and footprints and dusted for fingerprints. But once again, there really was nothing more the police could do other than follow the trail of footprints. It led along the edge of my yard and out to the street, where the snow was chopped up by tires.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *